alluring-skull

[alluring-skull]

chaos on parade

(Part 1)

(Part 2)

(Part 3)

(Part 4)

So, as I was going through writing about my dota experiences, there was one topic I glanced over despite really wanting to write about it. I alluded to it briefly in the second post, but it was a bit of a long digression in what was already an overly long post, so I decided I’d save it for a bonus at the end. And now that I’m done, I can finish off with this!

There’s not a non-terrible way to say this, but I’ve always been fascinated by griefing in cooperative games, even though I’ve rarely done it myself. On some level, I suspect it stems the same sense of “cheating the rules” as sequence breaking and similar glitches, albeit expressed in a way that’s rather ignoble. To me, actually doing it is too cruel and seems like it would get boring quickly, since as an act it tends to be one-sided (that is, the players being griefed can’t really respond in a meaningful or productive way). But it definitely had a lot of interesting consequences for the game as it went through early stages of development.

The Warcraft 3 game engine didn’t really have prevention against for most kinds of griefing appearing in Dota Allstars, a fact which became extremely clear as the designers struggled to actually prevent as many of them as possible. One, of course, was fundamentally unavoidable, since Warcraft 3 didn’t have a reconnect or player-replacement protocol: people just leaving the game. Many people would do it immediately on the map’s loading, simply leaving a 4v5 game, and often the game wouldn’t restart due to how time-consuming it would be to try again just to have another chance of the same thing happening. Occasionally a player from the opposing team would drop, leaving a 4v4 game, although in some way it often wasn’t really necessary. In mid 5.xx, the overall game balance, lower player skill, and lack of emphasis on team dynamics in the design meant that if you were the strongest player in the game even a 3v5 was perfectly winnable (plus, you could make money faster, giving an extra advantage). Of course, this frustrated players to no end still, especially as the game evolved and these became less true, and as a result many people hosting games ran a mod program to detect IPs and names of players who had “ruined” games (definition left up to the user...) and kick them automatically before they could do anything.

A somewhat more solvable but extremely pernicious problem arose from Warcraft 3′s lack of a native “no friendly fire” setting. While in some ways this informs the game design even now, it was quite common originally for griefers to just...attack allied heroes. That was it, at first. You pressed A for attack, then you clicked on your teammate and they would either have to run away or die. The first attempt at curbing this involved summoning a dummy unit to “hex” (in the context of Warcraft and Dota, this specifically means “turning into a small creature which can’t move quickly or attack”) a hero attacking their teammate’s hero, but since it only activated on actual striking it was possible in many cases to still slowly wear someone down. Still, it briefly curbed the incidence of that kind of griefing...until the (obvious) discovery that one hero was able to circumvent it freely: the Omniknight, who could cast a spell-immunity buff on himself, even at level 1.

Even now it’s a little terrifying when a teammate picks him. Especially if he goes to my lane. (Although in the current meta I’m not thrilled when enemies pick him either.)

Eventually, the scripting was rigged up so that if you tried to attack a friendly hero (or anything else on your team that wasn’t eligible for denies) it would just get interrupted, and that was that. And fortunately this proved straightforward enough to extend to other player-controlled entities, since there was a long period where it was possible to grief the game extremely efficiently with summon-based heroes like Prophet. You could literally just make treants and then start attacking your own base. (The invulnerability buff on base buildings prior to the destruction of previous tiers of towers didn’t exist at this time, so you could pretty much just go right in. This fact unsurprisingly also led to many people complaining about “backdooring”, or destroying buildings without properly pushing the lanes, and I’m incredibly happy that the devs never caved all the way, adding various protections against especially degenerate forms but still very much allowing high-risk plays as an option for pulling out a tough game.)  And for a brief period of time, you couldn’t even kill a player on your team who was doing this, due to the other changes...

I know by now I’ve pointed out a lot of what could generously be called “dubious” design decisions in Dota, but there’s no way I could ever consider it complete without bringing up what could well be the worst example of all: Morphling. In its original incarnation, Morphling’s ultimate ability allowed them to impersonate a member of the other team, along the lines of the Team Fortress spy. It was supposed to have a similar high damage effect when you suddenly “betray” them, too, although as I recall this aspect did not work properly at any point in its existence and even if it had, was certainly never going to be what the ability was used for.

For the duration of the impersonation effect, the player using Morphling was essentially changed into a copy of the other player as well, with their name and color changed in the in-map chat, and their team chat likewise being switched to the other team. Which on some level was a hilarious and impressively comprehensive design effort, but also very directly enabled abuse and really contributed nothing positive to the game. (I suppose that allowing the Morphling player to continue talking to their own team is tantamount to a clumsy maphack, but there are all sorts of reasons this isn’t a good solution to that issue, either.) Plus, while Morphling couldn’t directly use the copied hero’s normal attacks to kill enemy heroes in the same way that griefers could kill their team, he could abuse summons in the same way, which obviously isn’t fighting your own team but still basically cheating. It was honestly a huge relief when the skillset was finally reworked; like Pudge, the hero became stronger overall and much less terrible for the game as a whole.

Despite all this, I’d say aggressive griefing (that is, not the leaving kind) wasn’t that prolific. As I mentioned before, I feel like most players were in the game because they really wanted to go off with their favorite hero and win the game, and “dishonorable” play simply stole that feeling away from them. But the griefing remains memorable to me because it’s something I find inherently interesting and it evolved through time as it became less and less straightforward to do.

[alluring-skull]

song of the ancients

(Part 1)

(Part 2)

(Part 3)

As I mentioned, I kind of fell off of Dota Allstars during mid-6.xx, and wasn’t very sold on Dota 2 when it was announced. (Of course, it being a free to play game makes that part relatively irrelevant.) I suspect I wasn’t the only skeptic, and I think Valve likely realized this on some level; I’ve always felt that The International tournament series has been the core initiative of the game. It’s certainly hard to imagine it hasn’t made them an incredible amount of money at least, considering the prize pools of the last several tournaments (themselves composed of only a portion of the money spent by players during the lead-up to the championship).

The first International was a strange experience from the outside, and based on remarks from the players in a retrospective produced for TI7, it wasn’t any less so on the inside. Plus, it was hosted in Europe, meaning all the games took place very late at night, though fortunately for me I was basically a NEET at the time and could just stay up late enough to watch all the games anyway. I didn’t know anything about the professional scene for Allstars at the time so it was really exciting seeing that level of play for the first time, even if now it seems so quaint in some ways, especially given the extremely limited pool of heroes prepared for the tournament. Ultimately it was enough for me to sign up excitedly for what I’m sure would now just be called “Early Access,” and I got in at the end of the year and played for a while before my computer broke down and I didn’t have money to fix it. In the meantime I watched each new International on Twitch and promised myself I’d start playing again once they released the ARDM mode in Dota 2. (Which they eventually did, and was the catalyst for me reinstalling the game once I got a new computer.)

I absolutely don’t want to oversell this, because Valve is obviously a gigantic, hugely-profitable corporation with a lot of practices I don’t really like or agree with, but, despite all that I find The International to be a pretty refreshing esports event. More than any other developer I feel they’ve done a lot to provide a great spectating experience, with incredible in-client features allowing users to listen to commentary in several languages (or not) and watch the same experience as a stream (or not). On top of that, the “Compendium” system funds the prize pool while also providing regular players with incentives to watch and play the games. Overall, I feel that they’ve done a great job of investing fans in the game with these features, in a way I’ve never felt with other games (I think Blizzard is incredibly capable of ripping this off, in particular, but their games basically have *no* public spectating features which feels like an enormous oversight to me). 

And this extends to the overall production, as well; rather than having lots of commercials during broadcasts and dozens sponsor logos on everything, TI feels like a celebration of the game itself. Which is kind of silly, in some ways, like walking around Key Arena or wherever and seeing giant posters of characters like Morphling and Juggernaut that I find a bit generic, but the overall effect is really incredible. A better example would be the small galleries of art of the characters drawn by the tournament’s players themselves, placed around the arena. While obviously none of them are technical masterpieces they’re all great examples of letting the players and game content shine through; it’s fun seeing what subject they want to tackle with their art, and how they express it. And likewise, rather than commercial breaks the Valve tournaments tend to feature lots of pre-produced video interludes, starring players and other major personalities in the scene. A particular favorite of mine was TI7′s “Not Playing Dota (with Virtus.Pro)” where the team tackles an escape room together. While it’s not related to the game itself, it’s funny and actually does a lot to illustrate their personalities and teamwork, simultaneously feeling like a good way to “get to know them” outside the game while highlighting their strengths together. While I certainly have strong feelings about many players in the fighting game community, for example, it simply doesn’t have anything like this; my enthusiasm for them comes solely from following the scene closely over a long period of time. As you can ask a couple friends of mine, I’m actually REALLY BAD at keeping up with a lot of facets of Dota on its own, but it’s just so easy to get invested in the game without having to be completely immersed in the community, which I think is fantastic.

Overall, my trip to TI7 was an incredible experience, and I remember thinking before I went that it was just something I wanted to make sure I did once as a long-time fan of the game. But getting to hang out and be there in person (despite how superficially similar the watching experience is to seeing the stream) was so incredible and really deepened my love of the game (which is why I’m writing all this in the first place), and I’m now really hoping to go again. 

(Bonus)

[alluring-skull]

ancient colors infinity

(Part 1)

(Part 2)

In 2009, a few years after Icefrog formally took the reins of Dota, Valve announced they had hired him, with the press release calling him “one of the smartest designers we’ve ever met.” I remember this quote very clearly, because I mocked it pretty heavily for quite a while after reading it. I couldn’t imagine why they were hyping him up so much, and I was further baffled when they eventually revealed that the secret project he was hired for was a Dota 2 designed to be as close to the original mod as possible in most ways. My feeling was that direct competitors like League of Legends were already too close in many ways to the Dota game, anchored to bizarre and unnecessary consequences of the original game and engine design. Had these developers truly thought through the map design, team size requirements, and so on, or were they simply copying it because it seemed “good enough?” (League has since received a new smaller map for smaller team sizes, which, it turned out, did little to make me enjoy the game more.)

Of course, since 2009, the huge popularity of the “genre” (if you can call it that) has led it in many directions, with licensed games and heavily simplified indies (such as Awesomenauts) that I’ve barely touched alongside big names like League, Dota, and Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm. As much as I admire HOTS in particular for its aims to shorten and simplify games while also branching out the concept of player roles much further, I’ve barely been able to get into it, either. I sympathize overwhelmingly with new players who can’t overcome Dota’s enormously punishing learning curve, but no matter how bad I am, I’d never call myself a new player at this point. Surely, nostalgia is a factor at this point, as it’s a game I’ve played in some form nearly half my life, but getting to see it grow and develop for so long is by far the main attraction, from the wild west days of Warcraft 3′s battle.net to a hugely refined and intensely competitive “esports” game. For me the tipping point was coming to feel out the similarities between the game and fighting games, which I was familiar with as a high-level versus experience first. The initial phase of the game, especially, is heavily centered on effective ranges and small-scale movement, as opposing players near each other attempt to deal damage to each other and gain advantages from the computer-controlled minions without exposing themselves to too much danger. And there are many more factors to consider besides, as of course Dota isn’t a 1v1 game, a fact emphasized now perhaps more than ever in TI7′s “roaming”-centric metagame (i.e. the most common strategy was to pick high-mobility heroes who moved around the map early on to help all of their teammates get kills and other advantages early).

Perhaps the most best example of Dota’s complexity even relative to other entries in the genre is the concept of “denies”-a counterpart to the common mechanic of “last hits.” In games based on Dota, you get money for an enemy by dealing the finishing blow to it, but in Dota, you can also attack allied units (Warcraft 3 doesn’t have a simple option to prevent friendly fire, which seems to have caused repeated headaches to the developers over time but is arguably serendipitous in this case). By getting a last hit on your own team’s minions, you prevent the enemy from gaining experience and money from it (even if you don’t get money yourself, and I think originally didn’t gain experience either). In addition it tends to help you and nearby allies by allowing you to play effectively closer to the base, where you’re in less danger from enemy heroes overall. In 5.xx many players were not good at getting last hits already, and I don’t think the strategic power of denying was understood widely until well into version 6. It’s, to put it mildly, one of the game’s most controversial mechanics, with detractors claiming it doesn’t make sense and presents an unnecessary skill check. I’d certainly agree that it further emphasizes the importance of last hits, which are already perhaps both the most important and most mundane skill for “core” players, but it’s much more sophisticated when considering team dynamics, as “support” players generally shouldn’t be taking last hits from the players who need them more in the long term. With denies, these support players have many choices about how to work against the other team in the early game, whether it’s putting pressure on enemy heroes, taking denies from them so that their teammates can focus on last hitting, or protecting those allies from aggressive moves by the opponents.

Still, it’s obvious from playing or watching a game or two that the ability to get these last hits greatly differs between characters, even those in the “carry” category intended to focus on earning money and experience in the early game. As an example the “Drow Ranger” character shoots single, slow-moving arrows at enemies, while the “Sniper” fires bullets which have an essentially instant travel time, meaning he can shoot after she does and still hit a target first. It’s clear that, in the sense of fighting for a lane, this puts her at a significant disadvantage, even if this gap in overall power is likely to diminish as a game progresses. And a different ranged carry, "Medusa”, can fire arrows at several enemies at once and over the long term can earn money faster than either of them. But if gaining gold was the only factor that won games then the “Alchemist” character, with strong area-of-effect farming potential and an ability which lets him earn much more per last hit, would nearly always win. In contrast to the anarchic “balance” of version 5, where most heroes could become powerful enough to dominate a game, Icefrog’s Dota has honed in on small facets of the game and given each hero strengths and weaknesses across them.

In other words, it’s the opposite of trying to the game by making everything more “equal”; instead, by working to give each hero a unique combination of roles in the game he’s produced a competitive setting where nearly every hero can be considered useful for some strategic purpose. In the most recent International, the most prestigious tournament in the game to date, only four heroes failed to be chosen or banned in at least one game, with either of those understood to mean that a hero is at least worth playing to accomplish something in the game. But more than that, the winners of that tournament, Team Liquid, clearly demonstrated that they had the greatest breadth of strategies at the current time. A team absolutely needs to have at least a few different ones, since if it’s clear that they’re overly reliant on a few specific heroes or combinations it’s simple enough for the other team to prevent them from being picked. But Liquid’s threats went far beyond what many seemed to consider their most common choices, which many viewed as relatively gimmicky ones, showing that they could win games with many different strategies and had the nerves to keep cool through extremely long games and difficult comebacks.

In any case, watching the development of this game especially since Dota 2′s release, it’s clear this isn’t an accident, and has relied heavily not just on character design but carefully considered choices across many facets of the game. These aspects range from item design (particularly the most powerful items, like the Aegis and especially Blink Dagger, which has been basically nothing but nerfed since its debut) and team resources (wards to give vision, and more recently, the “smoke” and “dust” items commonly used to gain advantages in battles), to mechanics (7.0 was a huge overhaul!) and even the team drafting phase itself (which has been altered heavily since it’s oldest incarnations, with many more bans added and the other sequences changed slightly). Seeing all of this come together over so long has been a strange and incredibly rewarding experience of my time gaming, and after being at TI7, I’m more excited about the future of the game than ever.

(Part 4)

[alluring-skull]

ancient relics

(Part 1)

Playing Dota in Warcraft 3 was, unless you had a dedicated group on a LAN or something (which we occasionally did), an absolute ordeal. I’m not sure I could ever do justice to the myriad ways that it was an arduous task to even get a half-decent game, but I’ll try a bit; in short, anyone who played more than a few games of Dota before Dota 2, and especially before 5.84c, really loved the game. (Or they really loved their friends who really loved Dota, but I have to wonder what kind of strain that would put on a friendship after a while.) You had to, because if there wasn’t something you wanted with all your heart to get out of Dota you would never be able to put up with any other part of it. Winning, learning new heroes, or just getting that one amazing moment...I think every single player had some kind of ambrosia in the game that they could taste sometimes, but when they got it, it was only enough to make them crave more.

First, you had to go to the custom game search in the Warcraft 3 client. Then you could try to pick a game matching what you wanted, on the merits of version number and active game modes (5.54 was incredibly barebones on this front; there was all random mode, but no all pick!). But if it filled up while you were looking, and due to the popularity of the game, it often would, you’d have to return for a new search. Once you got to a game lobby and it filled up, the host would start the game, but many people would specifically ruin games by leaving as the confirmation came through, locking 9 players into an imbalanced game. And if everything went right so far, you then had to wait several minutes for the map to load. This could take a very, very long time, especially since it had to sync all the players at the start. Once everyone loaded in players would frantically pause, lest the host (or the player on the Blue color, which was sometimes someone else) fail to enter the command for game modes (there was code to use the in-game chat as console commands, with a few others introduced over time. A couple were extremely weird hacks to “solve” bugs.). If they typed in the wrong one, or nothing at all, people would leave (usually). Or they would leave for no reason. Or you could get griefed, suffering a drawn-out loss due to the sheer impossibility of overcoming a 6v4 game. And if you wanted to play with friends, it was even harder to successfully join a game together and on the same team; more than two and one of you absolutely had to be able to host (though having a host was a huge advantage in general, since you could share a game name beforehand and have all your friends copy and paste it right away).

Still, I hope I’m not giving the impression that the game was really good enough to make all of this worthwhile at first. I think a lot of what 5.52 and .54 had going for them at first was sheer novelty, especially since all random was WAY better than the default game mode. The Sentinels (now “Radiant”) had Conjurer, Crystal Maiden, and Stealth Assassin, while Scourge (”Dire”) had...Pudge. Those four represented the strongest heroes in the game as played, with CM and SA having ultimates with a tendency to kill entire teams before people reacted. I’ve never been certain if they were really that strong or if people were simply too bad and inexperienced to avoid and escape them. Pudge was also a summon-based hero at first, with a fly summon that, later in the game, could slowly backdoor the enemy base since they had high evasion and could summon more flies. In allrandom there was at least a chance of a game with none of these heroes, or at least some kind of “balance” since Scourge players could get more shots at the stronger ones.

5.55 brought huge changes to Pudge, but unfortunately they just turned him into an even more ridiculous version of CM, with a Corpse Explosion spell taken from Diablo 2′s Necromancer, a skill that generated especially corpses for him to use, and an ultimate which used the explosion repeatedly. (This is...sort of like current Luna, in terms of design concept, but the way it played out was basically Freezing Field with even more, bigger, harder to avoid damage.) I remember seeing that he was changed, picking him in my first game of .55, and returning to game search to see that 5.56 was already out. The reason for this was that changes to Slardar featured a bug with pretty severe implications for the game; his changes brought him near his current incarnation skill-wise, but the Sprint skill was a permanent toggle (no buff duration, just on and off), and in .55 it was bugged to give him spell immunity while sprinting, which even without the movement speed was obviously really broken, even with the tradeoff of more physical damage taken. In 5.58 Pudge was reverted to something more like his pre-.55 incarnation for a while; the short-lived version was fun for a certain kind of player, (me) but I think Guinsoo must have realized there was no good way to balance it.

But the game really did improve over time, despite each new hero being incredibly broken at release, a trend broadly continuing even now, arguably. Maybe the best example from 5.xx is Faceless Void, whose “Time Stop” ultimate originally stunned every enemy on the map. It’s not like heroes had to be new to be completely out of control, though, as anyone who defeated five heroes and Roshan alone at once (or saw their teammates or opponents do so), with Lifestealer or Sniper can surely attest. (Troll Warlord was the first hero who I think could truly contest Lifestealer, since even more than now you could quickly reach a point where you could chain-stun anyone with auto-attacks until they died.) Over time, Guinsoo’s version of the map actually kind of settled into a groove where almost any hero could become the god for a game if you played well enough, easily carrying a team to victory. Even at the time I’m not sure I’d call that good design, but I really enjoyed it.

A few heroes really deserve extra special mentions. For one, the “Invoker” hero’s spells were originally based on permutations (rather than combinations, as they are now). In other words, there were over thirty different spells, which you had to cast in the correct order and not just get the right number of each element, and I never learned what at least half of them did. As it stood most people would pick him and then use molten boulder the whole game, as the most obviously powerful spell. The alternative was to invoke random spells to see what they did all game, basically, and that didn’t have as high a chance of winning. Around 6.1 the hero was quasi-removed by putting it in a “Fun Tavern,” along with other incomplete or controversial heroes (such as Techies), which was activated by using its own special game mode. Another broken hero was the Gambler, whose skills were based on money; he could earn crazy amounts of gold with decent play, which you could cash out with his ultimate to instantly kill any enemy hero. Terrorblade originally had Rain of Chaos for his ultimate, summoning three huge golems and stunning enemies in an area (basically a stronger version of the one Warlock has now)-the change which gave him his more-or-less current ultimate (originally suggested by a poster on the forums) was a pretty huge and necessary downgrade, even though it’s still amazingly strong. Morphling got 3 Strength and 3 Agility from each level of the the stat boost skill (removed in 7.0), which over the course of the game amounted to 6 Agility thanks to Morph. With that and his natural stat growth you could easily get Agility over 200 and quickly blast people to death with extremely fast 250+ damage attacks.

Over the course of 5.xx, a few major modes were added; first all pick (the default mode in 2, allowing a player to choose a hero regardless of their “side”; which again, wasn’t originally an option. you had to pick heroes corresponding to your faction), and later the “easy mode” (with higher experience and gold gains, causing games to end more quickly) and “deathmatch,” which was always paired with all random since it resulted in the most interesting/fun/best designed version of the mode. I’m still a huge fan of the ARDM game (after I quit playing Dota 2 for a long while I swore I’d come back when Valve added it. They did, and I did); each team starts with a certain number of “lives,” and can lose the game normally, though usually DM ends when a team runs out of lives. When you die in Deathmatch you have to play a new hero (heroes that die are removed from the pool of hero choices for the rest of the game), and all-random ensures that you don’t get to choose what you start or come back as. This helps a lot with balance and overall playability, since some heroes are incredibly frustrating to fight against due to having amazing escape potential or other survival tools (like the Skeleton/Wraith King’s “Reincarnate,” forcing the enemy team to kill him twice in short succession to get him out of the game). Killing certain heroes is a huge struggle as the game goes on and they become powerful, but if you succeed there’s a good chance of them turning into weak supporting heroes, massively reducing the strength of the enemy team.

After the release of 5.84, major (numbered) updates halted for a long time. A “minor” update called “5.84c” was released, which I heard rumors was created by Russian fans who somehow got around the copy protection (or acquired a non-protected version of the map??) and tweaked it somewhat. Unlike the unfair changes other maps were notorious for, the .84c update actually fixed a few issues, and particularly, it cut down the extreme, ever-increasing load times significantly. Between these two factors it became one of the longest-lasting versions of the game, and in fact saw play for quite a while even after the major update to 6.xx, which a lot of people were reluctant to move to (myself included, I’ll admit).

Overall, I really wasn’t sold on Icefrog’s new direction for the game for a very long time, but it eventually won me over. If it hadn’t, I doubt I’d be writing this.

(Part 3)

(Part 4)

[alluring-skull]

ancient scapes

I just got back from Seattle, after watching the Valve Dota 2 tournament The International all week. I don’t talk about it too much beyond random tweets while watching other events at work (and so on) but I’ve played the game for a super long time (albeit somewhat sporadically overall) and definitely have a lot of attachment to it. I wanted to talk about some of the things that have really appealed to me over time, what it’s been like watching the evolution of a game that’s been alive, changing and competitive for longer than almost any other i can think of, a bit about the big event itself, and hopefully some stuff that will give other people an appreciation for what it’s like seeing a game that’s so much the same yet so different from one i played so much as a teenager. This isn’t the most complete, knowledgeable (I really have no familiarity with the pro scene before TI1 in particular), or accurate history you can probably find, but it’s mine, and I hope some people enjoy it. With all that in mind this first post is background (I’m giving this topic...probably 3-4, at least. I have a lot to talk about.)

In 2000 or so a distant, much older cousin introduced my younger brother and I to Starcraft. I think that was about the last time I ever talked to him. (It was extremely unrelated, but I have no desire to return to Texas at any rate.) At some point, probably about a year later, we found a copy for like $10 at a Toys R Us and instantly bought it. We didn’t have a home internet connection that was really usable to play online at the time (dial-up...) so we mostly played single-player, both vs AI and the campaigns. (Brood War didn’t have a key, so we totally just burned a copy of the CD we got from the library.) I played a bit with the map editor, but I couldn’t think of anything interesting to do with it, and making Starcraft maps kinda sucked anyway because the kind of symmetry you have to work with is really limited anyway due to the isometric view.

When Warcraft 3 came out, my older brothers’ friends (I think...) convinced him to get it since he was in college at the time. He got really into it, and my other brother and I played some as well. Eventually he moved home and the expansion came out, so my other brother and I got to start playing a lot. I again messed with the map editor, though I didn’t have any programming experience to touch the more advanced parts. I loved all the terrain construction and deforming (I was a huge, huge fan of Simcity 2000 and especially 3000 before this), but placing trees was kind of tedious and I never really finished anything still. Maybe if I’d had a better concept of “starting small” I could’ve gotten somewhere with things, but that took me a long time to learn. I’m saying this obviously not to be like “oh, I could’ve been Icefrog” (or even Guinsoo) but to emphasize how interesting the UMS map scene (”Use Map Settings,” the common Blizzard RTS community term to refer to these; now most people just use “mod”) was to me from the start.

DotA Allstars, as it was called during the 5.5x era when we started playing, was not the first map to use the general concept that’s become defined as its own genre, with a bunch of predecessors generally named things along the lines of “Aeon of Strife,” dating-I’ve heard, since I wasn’t around much on battle.net then, as I mentioned-back to Starcraft. (The name is a reference to the Starcraft backstory, I guess, so it’s not very hard to believe.) I did eventually find a couple, years later, and messed with them a bit, but the limitations of the design system in that game really don’t work well with the concept, even ignoring the maximalist design elements that are to some extent highlighted in dota’s enormous pool of heroes and items. (These elements are highlighted even more in the popular “Evolves” game type, where, for example, at some point in the game you lose a very good unit because it’s replaced with horrifically clumsy Protoss Dragoons, who have slightly better stats and extremely poor interactions with the engine’s pathing systems)

The newer AOS maps weren’t very good either, but the inherent leveling mechanic in Warcraft 3 made it a little easier to keep some semblance of consistent progression, and the amount of unit types you could set was much higher (I don’t know if there is a limit, but for Starcraft you can generally only create 1-2 different versions of any given unit, depending on if they have a “Hero” counterpart with a different name to tweak). Broadly speaking, most custom maps focused on hero play fell into what I can only describe as the “tome trap,” where you could buy items (consumable tomes) which didn’t take inventory space and permanently buffed stats. There’s three kinds of heroes in Warcraft, correlating roughly to the “Warrior Rogue Mage” thing, and each benefits most from a specific stat. That stat increases attack damage, and each stat has benefits for all heroes as well, with Strength giving health, Agility giving armor and attack speed, and Intellect giving extra mana pool and regeneration. But spells have cooldowns, so the tome items quickly become relatively useless for Int heroes, while Str heroes see slightly better scaling. But Agility gives attack damage and speed to Agility heroes, creating a compounding effect that becomes increasingly absurd the more you feed into it. Although, it did cause the animations to break in all sorts of hilarious ways, with certain breakpoints making the attack animations stop altogether or even go in reverse, so I still consider that a huge plus.

There was a bigger issue with pretty much all maps, due to the way that the map editor exported maps in a format that was, essentially, open-source. It was therefore very easy for people to make small tweaks to a map which would specifically benefit a certain player spot or character, save it under the same name, then host a rigged version of the game for other players. (There were a couple ways to tell if this was probably what was happening, but even so, it made looking for games very frustrating.) As it turned out, there was a workaround for this, by which you could make the editor unable to read the customized script data. The map still worked in game, but other players wouldn’t be able to make slightly altered copies; they would lose all of that code by trying to tweak anything and save a new version of the file. Essentially, it was copy-protection, and few mapmakers used it, probably since most AOS games, Tower Defense maps, and other styles didn’t really use any sophisticated scripting anyway.

Dota Allstars used the copy protection, though it had had relatively few unique abilities at the time we began playing it (I was familiar with another map with far more custom effects, Elil’s “Vale of Nightmares”). Perhaps the most well-known was the Crystal Maiden’s “Freezing Field” ultimate ability, still represented in the game to this day. But most characters simply had weird mixtures of default Warcraft 3 abilities, tweaked with different stats and so on, and strangely, the most egregious example of all (the Brewmaster, who pretty much just had the original Pandaren Brewmaster abilities from the game’s regular RTS mode) still just has the same stuff as ever. I think it’s fair to say that Allstars was never the most original game, and some things that have survived to this day (Lina Inverse is still called Lina!! What is that???) are still incredibly obvious ripoffs of stuff from Blizzard games, other video games, and anime. I understand the “Allstars” name came from this version being a patchwork of characters from different maps, though I’m not sure how true that is. It might explain some of the worst 5.5 era heroes, like “God” (a nigh-unkillable wisp with no offensive skills, who was removed for .52 and has never returned), and “Conjurer” (an outrageously busted magician on a horse, who could push to win the game in as little as 20 minutes with chain-stunning golems, even in a era where player micro was relatively poor), but it became very difficult to find other AoS type games at all once 5.52 and 5.54 locked in as extremely popular maps across the server. Both enjoyed popularity at once, as I recall; it seemed many people simply preferred one or the other and would gravitate toward that choice, making both open all the time. But the release of 5.55 was a huge paradigm shift, with complete overhauls for many heroes and numerous bug fixes and tweaks. Its release signaled the future of the game, in a sense.

Well, I don’t know. That might be giving too much credit to a version of the game which, as I recall, was the newest for approximately one hour.

(Part 2)

(Part 3)

(Part 4)

[alluring-skull]

sweet requiem

So, like I closed out mentioning last time, I’m very interested in game stories which try to manipulate the player. And really, I’d have to say that a lot of people are, with titles like Bioshock and Spec Ops: The Line from the previous console generation drawing enormous amounts of attention from players and critics for their efforts in this regard. I’m not terribly fond of either one, personally, and in some ways I don’t know how to feel about the way audiences seem to treat highly self-referential narratives as more profound. But I suppose I’ve done this just as much as anyone, particularly when it comes to Christine Love’s visual novel duology, Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus.

(Once again, there are spoilers.)

The main character of Analogue is a literal anime girl, who introduces herself to you as *Hyun-ae (the asterisk acting as shorthand denoting an AI). She and the game’s second most important character, *Mute, are diegetically 2-dimensional illustrations appearing on computer screens. (Specifically, the game uses a “remote terminal” conceit, similar to what I described last time.) The player is tasked with discovering the history of a ghost ship in space, and it’s by the end of the first act, *Hyun-ae reveals that that history is first and foremost her own backstory. Even as she acts cute and affectionate toward the player character (who it’s difficult not to treat as synonymous with the player themself, particularly in Hate Plus), it becomes clear that she unambiguously killed a whole lot of people. The final act of her route is essentially her defense, revealing her appalling abuse and mistreatment in the ship’s final years (and Hate Plus all but says outright that the society at that point was already well past Super Fucked). Ultimately, the player is given the choice as to whether or not to actually download the AI whose route they were on, which could be treated as an actual endorsement or rejection of each character’s faults, of which there are many. But obviously leaving them in grim solitude forever doesn’t leave much room for the sequel.

*Mute’s story is the anchor of Hate Plus, in much the same way that Analogue is about *Hyun-ae (likely even more so), and as a result, almost every “serious” interpretation of the game I’ve seen focuses on it. Personally, having expected that it was the “real” game, I played it first, and I was completely wrecked emotionally for a week after finishing it. (In a different way from the normal way that I’m wrecked all the time, of course.) It took me a lot longer to appreciate *Hyun-ae’s path, which, particularly because of the extremely unusual and meta sequence opening the third day, seems to be commonly viewed as something of a joke in comparison. (Though, if nothing else, the dialing back of her obsessive attachment to the player is greatly appreciated, as understandable as it perhaps was in Analogue.)

A lot of science fiction has a tendency to focus on questions of “what it means to be human”, generally by contrasting people with aliens, computers, or robots, who are written to be mostly like people, but not quite. The most famous examples may be from Star Trek, with characters like Data and Spock who struggle with being, essentially, “partly human.” And while this was a central premise of the AI characters even in Analogue’s predecessor Digital: A Love Story, the early revelation that *Hyun-ae was once a living human who now exists solely as a techromantic ghost skips Hate Plus right past all the weird philosophizing about humans being somehow extra special.

At the very beginning of the game, before getting into pretty much any of the actual story, there’s a message replying to an unseen inquiry, akin to how all of the conversations in Digital worked. (This is quite possibly the most interesting and loaded part of the entire story for me, to the point that I could probably write another entire essay on it alone. Definitely not promising that one, though.) It is, essentially, an ad, pitched toward a human seeking a mechanical body to house an AI. Despite a brief mention of the company’s promised “95% of Standard Human Resolution” sensory functions, it’s heavily centered on the qualitative benefits of having a body. In other words, it’s selling the idea of being able to share human joys with a companion previously restricted to incorporeal existence in a computer.

Through the game, *Hyun-ae’s occasional side dialogues imply in several ways that this is a concept that she holds very dear, especially because, long before even the backstory events in Analogue, she too was a human girl with a loving family. Both the second and third “days” of the game feature food-based rituals, and her 2D graphic mimes drinking soup and eating cake during these scenes.

Eventually, during the game’s ending sequence, *Hyun-ae asks if you’ll be able to get her a new body (she can’t read the message from earlier, since she’s nominally running on a virtual machine one layer lower). You can lie (ok, yes, there’s a very reasonable argument to be made that this is best for everyone’s safety, though during the course of the game another email message comes from an AI therapist offering to help), giving an ending where she’s displayed trapped in a cyberbirdcage. The other option, of course, is to agree to get her one, which then appears in both of the other endings. Throughout her dialogues, *Hyun-ae certainly seems most enthusiastic about being able to eat again, but that enthusiasm is inextricably tied to her memories of family. It’s less the food itself than the ways it’s symbolic of everything she’s lost.

*Hyun-ae isn’t looking for some elusive quality that makes her a human; she knows she already is one. What she wants, ultimately, is just to live again: to share old joys, have new experiences, and feel togetherness. After centuries having been denied all those things, it couldn’t be simpler. Perhaps it’s not the most profound statement about life, but it’s one I’ve felt is incredibly affirming on its own, and deeply appreciated as closure to what is overall a very heavy and overwhelmingly tragic narrative. And you get cake, too, while you’re at it. What a great game.

[alluring-skull]

I Can’t See You But I Know You’re There, Part 1

The other day I got in one of my meandering twitter rants about game stories and listed (without further comment) a bunch of games which I feel handle the player’s “connection” and interactions with the characters in unique ways. I’ve meant to write about several of these narratives and really stalled on at least a couple, so I’ll kick off with the one I suppose is the easiest in some sense: Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean.

There’s a lot of aspects of the game (and its prequel) which are arguably worth commenting on, particularly since the first game as a whole is much more “interesting” than it is actually enjoyable to play through. (Origins is, well, more fun and less interesting, so it's kind of balanced out.) Still, this post has large spoilers for what I think most people would consider the most interesting parts of the game, so, you know, if that concerns you you might want to not continue.

Within the game, the player is represented as a kind of spirit, who’s “bonded” to the evident main character, Kalas. (He has blue hair, fights with a sword, and is the first character you meet, so the implications are pretty obvious.) Kalas asks for your name and gender, and from then on you basically control him on the map and so on like you would any other main character. During certain cutscenes, he and the other characters will ask you questions pertaining to the current situation, or otherwise remark on your presence, but over time, particularly due to his character traits, your limited participation in the story, and the number of really time-consuming battles you have to play through, it’s easy to slowly forget that Kalas is not actually supposed to be the player’s avatar.

Eventually, during the whole process of traveling the world and collecting plot macguffins, one of the critical items is discovered to be missing. It’s clear that a member of the group is a traitor, though the characters find themselves unable to determine who it is. (In a much smaller interesting bit, the “Key Item” list is updated immediately upon the scene where the first betrayal happens. I suspect it’s not a common habit among JRPG players to check it so aggressively, especially since I can’t think of another game which does this without telling the player, but it’s a cool detail. The game eventually flashes back to this moment, so if you were to somehow play the game a second time, it’d be easy to see.)

Ultimately, the traitor is revealed to be Kalas himself, and he attacks the party and breaks his bonds to you, causing the scene to black out. Shortly after, the game’s main heroine manages to connect to you, and you become “bonded” to her instead for a substantial portion of the game. Eventually, Kalas returns, repents and is more or less forgiven, and returns to regular “main character” type duties-which is ultimately not very surprising, this being a JRPG and all-but it doesn’t really diminish the impact of that initial twist, which upends the game narrative in a truly unique way.

Gust’s later Surge Concerto series runs a somewhat similar setup in a different, sci-fi centric direction (your vita/console setup is presented as a computer terminal with a transdimensional connection to other terminals in the game setting). MORE SPOILERS, although seriously these games are worse in every possible way than Baten Kaitos (as much as I love Akiko Shikata’s music and singing) and full of distasteful anime cliches and jokes despite a handful of bright spots. I don’t remotely recommend playing unless you enjoy getting queerbaited super hard or something.

In the first game, Ciel nosurge, your terminal is just a stationary computer; the plot of the game is mostly backstory leading up to the main character’s imprisonment in a surreal stasis world, while she tries in the present to build a robot to house the terminal and help her escape. As it’s more or less a visual novel and has never been localized, I haven’t played it, but as I understand it the game presents fake error messages to players to end certain scenes and frequently gates overall progress (in both plotlines) by realtime, meaning it takes several weeks to actually get through the entire thing.

The sequel, Ar nosurge, is an RPG where you play as the now-finished robot (with magical backup from the heroine), but also promotes a pair of younger minor characters named Delta and Casty from Ciel (now...older teenagers, I guess) to main characters. You switch between the two parties frequently, which, again, quickly feels “normal,” particularly if you aren’t familiar with the previous story (after all, Final Fantasy VI had parts like this!). Ultimately the game begins manipulating the player directly, as the main villain begins to break the fourth wall and at one point directly explains how the plot is going to progress, leading up to Delta breaking the remote control over him. In parallel scenes, the robot is destroyed, with its head (the computer) stolen, while Delta argues with the player before kicking them out of his brain. (”I just want to play this bad game,” a dialogue option protests. It doesn’t work.) Eventually, he decides there’s no other option to defeat the villains and lets the player back in, leading to the assembly of a new robot, and the plot returns to more-or-less normal modes of progression.

Overall, I’m really interested in game narratives which directly manipulate the player, whether it’s via guilt (something like Shadow of the Colossus) or other emotions and interactions. I’m hoping that writing out this post will give me a good lead-off to the next one, which I’ve been trying to write for ages, But maybe it will become a sad, orphaned Part 1 with no sequel.

See you next time?

[alluring-skull]

i forgot to mention that this game is really disgusting, like me

Today is apparently the (11th) anniversary of Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2′s American release, so this is a good excuse to write about what I’ve wanted to for well over a year now. It’s quite controversial even among SMT fans, but it’s become my favorite game under the banner, with the franchise’s most complex and rewarding battle system, great character designs, and a lot of incredible music and environmental art. The story does take characters out of the party in a way that can be extremely frustrating (I understand when people say they quit over it), though, and the final stretch of the game is rather awkward thematically. This isn’t a review, though, so that’s pretty much all I have to say about those things. spoiler warning (though this should probably be assumed in every post I make).

Many SMT games have used real-world religion and myth as the core of their narratives, with entries like most of the core series and Devil Survivor leaning heavily on biblical stories and the Judeo-Christian God. In Digital Devil Saga 1, most of the main characters take on “demon” forms inspired by Hindu tradition, and the goal of the main characters is nominally to ascend to “Nirvana” and escape the suffering of their world, which is called the “Junkyard.” Of course, most of what’s in between all of that is not particularly faithful to any kind of source material I know of, and in the end the Junkyard is a computer simulation and Nirvana turns out to be its own kind of similar-and-just-as-bad hell, with the characters finding themselves in a severely messed up “real world” in the stinger for part 2.

DDS2 continues to prominently feature characters and bosses based on Hindu gods and stories, as well as having reincarnation as one of the most prominent themes (the game even opens with a scene of the main characters all as children, when in the previous part it was revealed they were never children in their previous lives in the Junkyard). Despite this, I feel there’s another religion that’s just as important in the world-building, if not more so: physics.

I already know that many people balk at the idea of a “hard science” being religious in nature, and certainly I can remember a time in the past when I would have, too. Yet as physics has advanced over the centuries, it’s increasingly come to seek answers for questions which focus on ideas like the nature of our reality and the beginning and end of the universe—ideas which religion and philosophy have also been involved with for a very long time. And indeed, in “theoretical physics,” concepts which are as yet impossible to produce empirical evidence for, such as the well known “string theory,” are pursued, in hopes that they will bring new and better answers to these questions. The opening scene’s explanation that the world’s smallest “building blocks” are just data is more than just name-dropping; at every level our world is an amalgamation of objects which bear almost no resemblance to their individual component parts, from bodies to cells to molecules to atoms to protons and neutrons to quarks. At a certain point it’s simply too abstract to understand beyond a name, an index.

Data really is everything in DDS: both matter and energy, life and death, destroyer and savior. Corrupted data from God in the sun kills plants and turns humans to demons, forcing survivors to shelter in domes and tunnels. But the same sun ultimately rejuvenates the world and returns the main characters to a seemingly peaceful life after numerous, violent self-sacrifices. Alaska’s HAARP facility, a famous radio communication device (and source of conspiracy theories), even plays a significant role in the plot.

And while the “evil/callous scientist wants to play God” backstory developed in the middle of the game is hardly original in broader culture, it contrasts heavily with so many of the other SMT games, where more traditional religious fanatics tend to incite the plots.

In conclusion, I really like Seraph and Argilla. And Jenna and Heat. Bye.

[alluring-skull]

Ok. I’m trying to write shorter things. Let’s pick something small to write about.

I reminded myself today how much I love QWOP. If you don’t know what QWOP is you should just go play it first, not because I’m going to spoil the game per se (there are...amusing surprises...as you progress, but that’s not what this is about) but because I really do think seeing and feeling it yourself is important context to have. (For this post. And also your life.) In fact, trying to say anything analytical about it feels like overexplaining, it’s so elegant.

Anyway, QWOP has cosplayers and speedrunners, so I think it’s fair to say that the game really resonates with some people. These are not the only metrics I use, but I think they are very good ones. Here’s another one: I showed it to my mom once, and she spent several minutes in bewildered laughter as she tried to get a grip on it. The joke is so straightforward I’m inclined to believe that pretty much anyone can “get it” right away.

But in real life, everyone isn’t on the same level. Many people can’t walk, yet for the majority of the population, it’s something we do constantly by nature. And it’s not just the frequency or length of time; people in general learn to walk at such a young age that they don’t remember learning, even though it took months, much less not being able to do it at all. So even if QWOP doesn’t feel like actually learning how to walk, it’s just such a clever use of design to make something “easy” and “natural” for the majority of the audience extremely strange and difficult. At least for me, it really put things in perspective and made me think about things I take for granted.

It’s worth pointing out that this has practically spawned its own genre of games, not just in Foddy’s later games (two of which are about rock climbing and hiking a treacherous hill as a unicorn respectively), but in things like Surgeon Simulator 2013, in which you try to perform delicate operations with a wonky physics engine and controls that make it difficult to even hold anything in your hand.

I can already see someone responding with “it’s not that deep” or something like that but I really, truly think it’s clever and am not just being weird for weirdness’ sake. I promise.

[alluring-skull]

hello world

hi. this is my new blog, for now. if you know me from somewhere else, you can probably find the old one, but i haven’t written on it in like four years. because it’s a chore. everything explodes out to 3000 words so it takes forever, and then i notice a hundred mistakes and

well anyway i’m hoping i can make things a little easier here. often i don’t want to actually review stuff, just point to one aspect i really like. i guess we’ll see how this goes.

i’m hoping to start a blog for art and music or anything else i make soon too. we will also see how that goes.